Pre-Alpha

Pre-Alpha is a standard term to denote a number of interim milestones between prototyping and alpha, each of which includes new functionality and/or game content. Pre-alphas often mandate incremented improvements on a number of parallel areas in a project, but rarely expect any one of those areas to be complete. The exact content of each pre-alpha is often an ongoing discussion between producers on the team and those at the publisher.

Pre-alphas are usually followed by alpha, beta, release candidate and gold master milestones.